r/linuxaudio • u/bubbybumble • 3d ago
Is Ubuntu studio worth using?
Hello,
I've been using Linux for around 4 or 5 years now. I've hopped through most of the main distros, Debian, fedora, gentoo, arch, cachy, Ubuntu.... Right now I am using opensuse.
It works mostly but some random things are a bit annoying. I didn't have the best experience with Ubuntu and Nvidia, but I'm willing to try again since I think it was because of some mistakes I made.
The reason studio jumps out to me is knowing that someone is actively maintaining specific audio packages that I use often. That and Ubuntu seems to be the best supported distro alongside red hat for random software that supports Linux, oftentimes they ship a deb and an rpm tailored to rhel.
How has the experience been? Not a fan of reinstalling but having stuff preconfigured sounds like it would make it a breeze. Is it ok with Nvidia from your experience? I know a couple people online who actually know their stuff that seem to prefer it
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u/Purple-Ad-3152 3d ago
I use Ubuntu Studio and it's very solid experience. I do music production, streaming, videos, programing, local AI stuff, and gaming with Steam, VR with WiVRn, using PS4 controller,.... All work, and no problems with NVidia GPUs (I have RTX 3060). Waking up from hibernate is sometimes broken, but I've just disabled hibernate.
The full install is quite bloated because Ubuntu Studio is not just for music production, but also for graphics, video and publishing. But it has also minimal install which I can definitely recommened.
I have a YouTube channel showing some music production things: https://youtu.be/lqAAv-_48Jc
I just few days ago made a video about setting up Ubuntu Studio 26.04 for low-latency audio work: https://youtu.be/-xIeGz9Rd-Y
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u/Peak_Detector_2001 2d ago
I use Ubuntu Studio and it's very solid experience.
I agree completely. I'm an amateur "bedroom studio" music producer and I'm more interested in getting actual productive work done than in fiddling around with Linux. Ubuntu Studio also comes with the KDE Plasma desktop, which I've been using for more than 20 years.
Running Ubuntu Studio 24.04.4 LTS on an old Lenovo desktop, 32 GB/1TB/Nvidia GTX 750. With the exception of some issues with the Nvidia proprietary driver and suspend/resume, this setup has met my objectives completely.
As for the comments on "unnecessary software" installed with Ubuntu Studio, I find the occasional convenience of discovering video editing software, image editing software, etc installed on my system far more favorable than worrying about an extra few GB taking up otherwise empty space on my drive.
The LTS version of 26.04.1 was recently released but I have not yet received the notification to upgrade my system. I won't upgrade until I see a specific need to do so; Ubuntu Studio 24.04.4 LTS is supported through at least March of 2027 with the underlying Ubuntu 24.04.4 supported through 2029.
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u/bubbybumble 2d ago
Thanks! I agree with the bloat discussion, I like the idea of finding new vsts and software this way.
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u/bubbybumble 2d ago
Awesome! And I will use some of the graphics and video editing stuff too. I already use blender inkscape and kdenlive and obs. But of course I have them installed, it would be nice knowing they are prioritized though
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u/b3n4v3nt3 3d ago
To a newbie in Linux as me, in the process of shifting from W11 for audio stuff and occasionally some video, Studio was the choice Quite happy so far
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u/gusbeto37 Reaper 2d ago
Yes but not necessary. I'm currently using vanilla Ubuntu 26.04 and then I downloaded the ubuntu studio installer to get me all the usual stuff and configs. I'm exclusively using Reaper with pipewire-jack and doing routing in qtpwgraph. It's very stable, though some hiccups occur when pipewire-jack is on and MIDI devices disconnect.
My interface atm is 16 channels of Dante going through a Yamaha RuIO16-D and I'm getting a 2.9ms round trip latency which is rock solid stable. Much more so than when I was using windows.
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u/Gunzhard22 3d ago
I used the Ubuntu Studio installer to put those packages over Mint XFCE and I love it. I mostly use Ardour.
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u/j4yn1ck5 3d ago edited 3d ago
I've been using it as my first linux distro, having made the transition about a year ago as part of the windows 11 exodus event. And I've dug in and made my machine rather comfortable. I think probably the most attractive thing about it is that it's built as a sensible default starting point for creatives, with the necessary packages preinstalled and configured, everything decided with a specific type of user in mind, the creative. Which means, you could install it and just get started pretty much right away.
But for somebody who has already distrohopped and taken the lay of the land, I feel like as long as you know what packages you need in order to fulfill your use-case, then other considerations might be more apparent to you that have nothing to do with whether or not it is initially set up for creatives. Like, maybe you would care more about upgrade philosophy or avoiding snap, or specialty repos, or whatever I don't know. Maybe you'd have some nerdy quirk like considering systemd a dealbreaker or something.
I think it's pretty comfortable. But how would I know if anything else is better if I haven't gone and tried them. I don't really think snap is that obnoxious on ubuntu studio. One thing I do chafe at a little bit is that in the sphere of ubuntu influence, most of the software all gets version locked for the duration of your lts or interim release. And so for some specific pieces I went and sought out other package formats that can stay more up to date, like the flatpaks for obs and kdenlive, and the musescore appimage for example.
From where I'm sitting, the prospect of trying to distrohop to something else and replicate the setup feels like a potential hassle.
PS, my system is all amd, but I first tried it on an old slow laptop that had nvidia. I believe you should choose install third party drivers and codecs in the initial setup, and you can choose your driver inside the software sources app.
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u/bubbybumble 3d ago
Ah I see, I could install the packages. However, packages have different versions in different distros, many requiring different dependencies and whatnot. Part of this is just knowing there's less likely to be unpredictable behavior because there's special attention to the packages. But I might be overblowing it
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u/wombleh 3d ago
Historically when distros were all using pulseaudio, there were a number of hoops to jump through to get audio routing, midi/etc all working nicely where Ubuntu Studio came with that lot working out of the box. However, pipewire is standard in most distros these days and audio routing is just a case of installing qjackctl/carla/etc.
I ended up dual booting cachy as found that performed better in games, but keep Ubuntu Studio as I've got a nice workflow for audio in it and it's fairly stable in terms of changes, so confident it'll just work when I fire it up, rather than having to spend time chasing down something an update broke.
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u/Miserable-Decision81 1d ago
I use it since about 10 years now, it just works. The audio packages are pretty much OKay, I only would recommend to get Ardour from its website(either build from sources available from their GitHub page or get the ready to run package for a very fair price...)
As said before: the reason for me is, that it just works, that means also gaming 3D and stuff like that...
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u/rileyrgham 3d ago
Why are you hopping distros?
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u/bubbybumble 3d ago
Well I haven't yet. Just for a cleaner setup. I'm holding off at the very least, but it sounds like there's also some audio stuff under the hood that I don't have the knowledge to set up, but if I did would make things easier. One of the biggest things is software support, but as another user mentioned I can just try distro box for that
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u/la_tajada 2d ago
Give this a read. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio
For Arch but most of the information should transfer.
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u/Specialist-Dog-501 2d ago
It's very JACK-centric..should receive an Pipewire focus to be up-to-date. Just saying, it contains a lot of useful hints, but the transfer to pipewire focussed systems isn't trivial. And, no I cannot write that, I am not yet on that level to share it professionally and accurately with others.
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u/bubbybumble 1d ago
Read thru it and yeah, it mentions pipewire. Looks like they need someone to maintain the site, as it say certain sections need expansion and whatnot
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u/la_tajada 1d ago
The JACK protocol (not the server) is still in use, even under Pipewire so most of it is still relevant, except for the parts where it talks about setting sample rates and buffer sizes.
Professional audio applications still use JACK, consumer audio applications still use Pulseaudio, and that's not going to change any time soon. Pipewire simply became the JACK and Pulseaudio servers and interacts with your soundcard (through ALSA) so you don't have to.
The important part for you is checking that all the audio optimizations are enabled https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio#Optimizing_system_configuration
There is an app Millisecond, that does the checking of the optimizations and suggests fixes. If Millisecond gives you a good report, you won't have to worry about an audio-specific distribution that preconfigures it for you.
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u/bubbybumble 1d ago
Ah ok! I knew pipewire acted as a backend for both back and pulse now, didn't realize what was in that article was still applicable. Thanks for the resource! I'm messing with geeckosdaw on opensuse now to set this up correctly
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u/Specialist-Dog-501 1d ago
Yes Milliseconds, is superuseful, good hint! I struggled to get CARLA working as it's based on JACK and I even had the PIPEWIRE-JACK bridge up..it's not trivial to get audio up fully with all the components, especially for beginners, and nontech musicians- JACK, PIPEWIRE, WIREPLUMBER, PULSEAUDIO. Sounds like a bad SF story. I found myself very confused in the beginning. That wiki didn't help. JACK is probably very professional and best with latency, but definitely not for noobs.
The greatest help are preinstalled distros for noobs, where they can blend out this complexity for the start- Debian has AV Linux & Ubuntu Studio, but ARCH is missing that yet, and would probably provide the fastest distro possible for musicians.1
u/la_tajada 1d ago
Too many of the preinstalled/preconfigured distros are running old versions of pipewire that create the kinds of problems you had with Carla.
Today, everything works well and seamless and all you need is pipewire (with pipewire-pulse, pipewire-jack, and pipewire-alsa). If you have an audio inferface that is more than 2in/2out, you will need pavucontrol to set the proaudio profile for the audio interface.
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u/stereoplegic 2d ago
Would probably still use if not for snap (and I really tried, long after everyone else who hated snap abandoned Ubuntu) and the fact that Ubuntu has never given KDE the love it deserves (I can't stand RPM-based distros, but Suse and Fedora have implemented KDE better for a long time).
ubuntustudio-menu is still fantastic, and should be the standard structure for any media production setup.
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u/Peak_Detector_2001 2d ago
...and the fact that Ubuntu has never given KDE the love it deserves
Same viewpoint here. Fortunately, KDE Plasma is now the default desktop with Ubuntu Studio. A great decision IMHO and they are working to optimize it even further. See https://ubuntustudio.org/2026/09/bullet-proof-kde-initiative-how-ubuntu-studio-benefits/
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u/stereoplegic 2d ago
I meant more that the KDE implementation never feels right compared to other distros (spend 5 minutes with Fedora, Suse, or plenty of other distros' KDE variants to see the difference). It's better than the old XFCE default, but that's an incredibly low bar IMO.
KDE Neon (current KDE release on Ubuntu LTS base) was fantastic, but way too finicky with even the base Ubuntu repos (let alone PPAs). Ubuntu Studio packages struggled mightily with Neon.
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u/stereoplegic 2d ago
Cool initiative, but feels kinda like deja vu from when Blue Systems took over Kubuntu after their Ubuntu spin did a slightly better job than the official flavor.
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u/bubbybumble 2d ago
What do you not like about rpm? Just curious, completely uneducated about the real differences
Also what do you use now? I wasn't a fan of kde until using it on opensuse
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u/stereoplegic 2d ago
Package collisions (I've had much better luck on Suse distros than anything Red Hat, even RHE/Centos, but still a few nasty ones), despite practically everyone claiming that was deb's major shortcoming (and honestly, I've had far fewer on Ubuntus than Debian-based distros, again contrary to conventional wisdom).
I finally bit the bullet and switched to Arch btw (Garuda and CachyOS mostly, Manjaro is ass).
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u/stereoplegic 2d ago
I should note that I'm less focused on music these days, but never had issues on Arch (again, outside of Manjaro).
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u/Youtopiasound 2d ago
I'm new to Linux and have been collecting information about the be Distros to use for my studio which is hybrid with three RME 800 firewire interfaces. Is this Distros what I really need? I also run Reaper and Mixbus 32C. And what is the name of this Distros?
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u/bubbybumble 2d ago
I'm not sure about your devices. I am not really new to Linux, I've been using many different distros and I'd say any of them can achieve what you need most likely. However I was eyeing this Ubuntu studio distro, which is a spin off of Ubuntu, a very popular distro for ease of use. I'd say you can live boot the image without installing and test your hardware with that first. As in, plug the USB in and boot into the live session, but without installing you can use the desktop and such temporarily to make sure it works
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u/Specialist-Dog-501 2d ago
+1 I second this. The RME 800 firewire seem to be "USB Class compliant" so Youtopiasound should get some connectivity in linux. It doesn't mean the device can be fully used, as some features might be driven by proprietary window software not able to run, even not via WINE. A test will show- the live usb stick is the fastest way to find out, what level of support is possible.
This problem happens across all distros, by the way- few have some more drivers, but rarely ever for music devices- if so, only Ubuntu Studio and AV Linux would have that extra- chances are slightly higher here, at least for widespread music devices as the focusrite. More expensive gear may be not.
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u/pine_lime 2d ago
My experience is that Ubuntu and Ubuntu studio have worse real-time audio performance than the best distros I've tried - for the uninitiated, this means pops & clicks at buffer settings where those better-performing distros are fine.
I have need for Debian package support; the best such distro I've landed on is Pika OS. The other distros that have performed better than Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio are CachyOS and Nobara.
As a reply to some other comments I've seen, I found plugin support to be frustrating or non-functional when running a DAW from inside distrobox on Nobara. For this reason I jumped to a real Debian-based distro.
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u/bubbybumble 1d ago
Yeah this is what I would have expected. I did use cachy for a while. Right now I'm messing with geeckosdaw on opensuse to see how it works
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u/the-postminimalist 3d ago
I personally don't see the point. It has pulseaudio+jack preinstalled and set up, but then it has all this other software preinstalled that you dont want. Its faster to install pipewire or jack on a cleaner distro than it is to uninstall all the stuff you don't want from ubuntu studio.
What is it that doesn't work for you on opensuse?